La ruine du regard

La ruine du regard (The Ruins of the Gaze, 2010) is a 5-screen architectonic video installation about the historic Les Halles, Europe’s biggest metro station/shopping center complex, in Paris. The work was filmed just before the area is to be rebuilt. The metro station’s central traffic interchange has been nicknamed ‘The Flipper’. The pinball metaphor aptly depicts the uncertain, violent character of the liberal world: stay in the game as long as possible, follow the rules, and be ready to be hurled out at any moment. The people coming face to face at Les Halles are caught between endlessly judgmental gazes, social conflicts and history, right at the centre of the city of the image. The installation’s five irregularly shaped, sculpture-like screens form a space of intersecting perspectives.

The work consists of multiple layers of footage on HD, S8mm, S16mm and archival images. It depicts people who haven’t really a place to go, staying, waiting idle in Les Halles. Distinguishable amid the mass of humanity in the enormous building complex are a few individuals who momentarily break out of the ongoing, grinding pulse of everyday life, to become untouchable. The horizon, poetic possibility of escape, is to be reached somewhere beyond the visible world. Pennanen has made La ruine du regard in collaboration with Parisians of various ages and with young film students from the suburb of Aubervilliers.

This new work concludes her eight years of working in European shopping centres and public spaces. La ruine du regard is the third part of a trilogy, the first two parts being Monumentti Näkymättömälle (A Monument for the Invisible) shot in Helsinki, 2003, and Sõprus – Дружба (Friendship), shot in Tallinn, 2006.